Reading Paul Landacre's Archive: California Landscape and the Erasure of Indigeneity
Wed 10/23/2024 • 4PM - 5:30PM PDT
William Andrews Clark Memorial Library
Second Annual Spotlight Talk by Johanna Drucker, Distinguished Professor and Breslauer Professor Emerita, Information Studies, University of California, Los Angeles
Paul Landacre was a wood engraver and artist whose first published work, California Hills (1931), established his reputation within the Fine Press community of Los Angeles. The images in California Hills raise issues in relation to the longer traditions of representations of the “pristine” and “uninhabited” landscape, thus participating in an erasure of indigenous peoples that had been part of landscape painting. Clark Library collections include many useful materials for establishing the background for this erasure in documents from the 19th century onward in which the struggles for recognition, sovereignty, and identity are recorded. This talk presents an approach to reading Landacre’s archive in relation to this rich historical material.